Three weeks ahead of the fourth Council of Europe Summit of Heads of State and Government, to be held on 16-17 May in Reykjavik, Icelandic Foreign Minister Thórdís Kolbrún Reykfjörd Gylfadóttir presented, on Tuesday 25 April, the objectives of the summit to the spring plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly.
“The agenda and outcome document clearly focus on Ukraine”, she confirmed, recalling the importance of creating a Register of Damage “under the auspices of the Council of Europe, but with broad support of leading world nations”.
This would be “a historic occasion for our organisation - but most importantly an important step towards accountability for crimes committed in this brutal war”.
We stand “at a crossroads”, the minister continued, regretting that since 2003 (imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky), 2006 (assassination of Anna Politkovskaya), 2008 (war in South Ossetia), 2012 (imprisonment of the Pussy Riot), 2018 (poisoning of the Skripals in London) and above all the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Europe has chosen “comfort over courage” and “ complacency over responsibility”.
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, “the choice was clear”: the expulsion of Russia from the Council of Europe and the realisation that our system “based on liberal democracy and human rights” is under attack.
The Summit should be an opportunity to “unite around the Council’s core principles and reaffirm our common commitment to the values that have proven to be such a blessing for the people of the world”, she concluded.
These objectives were confirmed later in the afternoon by Irish MEP Fiona O’Loughlin (ALDE), who was responsible for the report on the Assembly’s contribution to the Summit.
Siofra O’Leary, President of the European Court of Human Rights, who succeeded her on the rostrum, said the forthcoming summit comes at a “crucial moment for Europe’s rule-based order”.
She says that she focused on specific issues in the Preparatory Memorandum: safeguarding the European Convention on Human Rights system, the Court’s resources and a renewed commitment by States to the binding nature of judgments.
The holding of the session in the European Parliament hemicycle during the proceedings taking place at the Council of Europe gave her the opportunity to call for “the creation of more deliberate and productive synergies between the Council of Europe and the European Union”. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)